In the opening and title poem of David Groff’s new collection, Live in Suspense, we are confronted with the traumatic echoes of the AIDS crisis and the double consciousness of the speaker, who experienced it as a lethal reality that still resonates within him, even as it becomes historical for others:
when I kiss Clay
I recall how HIV, unchecked,
made our every day a next-to-last,
urgent as orgasm, until
it was tamed as truth and metaphor.
Which is why when I kiss Clay
I taste the dust of his tongue.
Re-erected with desire,
we are meta-physical,
the little death a resonance away.
Leaving him, I return to him.
The substitution of period for comma highlights both the bifurcation and causal conjunction of the two thoughts – and modes of thinking. On the one hand, living with death as a close psychic presence is credited with instilling the sense of urgency to be present to living love. On the other, the “live” erotic expression of the relationship helps to push the presence of death aside to make room for the beloved, a kiss indeed “meta-physical” within the consciousness that conceives and cherishes it within, because of and despite an ever-threatening world.
Returning to people and experiences in leaving them is an approach – or meta-physical understanding – Groff brings to the embrace of his own being and experiences in many ways in the poems. Whereas the act of leaving Clay in space evokes a “return” through biography and history to the moment of presence with the beloved, there are also many poems in which separation in time creates psychic space within which to explore events and relationships with a similarly open presence to more of their intricacies, valences, and possibilities.
The shadows of family silence are one gateway into this space. “Write About Somebody Else’s Family!” continues from the title’s opening line. The statement, after all, is meant to collapse the reflective space between the speaker and the family’s dogmatic narrative, like the reflective space often perceivable between a title and a poem:
cried my father when he saw
there on the dining room table
my college notebook open,
expecting a Grecian urn and finding
Uncle Grant’s hand on my leg —
These lines are a complicated opening to a verse künstlerroman thread of poems, presenting the artist’s struggle to bring his own material into its necessary form at odds with both the family’s wish to protect its façade and the previous generation’s appreciation of a different conception of poetry, all of which is trying to find its way into the student’s work. Yet, the mature poet’s response to this situation is not a counterattack on the cultural and familial factors, but simple witnessing of the child – and the young man – at that time hidden in their shadows:
Now I was the whispering one,
the insinuation,
eating paper
in a boy’s own prison
where the family of hiding
hides the strayed son
and strips him of
his penis and pen until now.
The speaker focuses on liberating himself from “a boy’s own prison,” where homophobia stifles and pathologizes erotic, psychological, and creative expression, keeping him from the home part of his work. Again, compassionate witnessing of past suffering fosters present resilience, here in an intertwined embrace of his sexuality, voice, and vision.
This returning to the self in, through, and as the re-visioned past deepens in “Days of 1986.” Opening with the cutting evocation of “My suspect blood,” the poem describes the existentially charged walk to submit blood for HIV testing:
My suspect blood.
Dr. Siroty filled a vial
I had to take myself
down the grim avenue
to the Board of Health
in the cold spring evening,
crosswalk after crosswalk
as the sun sidled in.
I saw hundreds of others
like me bearing their blood
but inside their bodies.
The vial — I wanted to pluck it
from my backpack and
prop it on top of a pay phone
or stash it in the trashcan
with the dead Daily News,
wanting no news, not even
good news, all news cleaving
me from my brothers.
But I kept taking steps,
the street annoying with life,
the sun incumbent,
the storefronts bloody gold,
until I had to enter
the Board of Health to find
an unguarded tray of vials
and place mine among them,
all of us numbered,
together in our before.
I went back into a city
vital with night,
the world a blade
so cutting that at times
I could feel I could feel.
The organization of the final two essential soul making experiences into independent stanzas allows each a moment of resonance. The phrasing and line break concluding the penultimate stanza recasts the depersonalizing test identification numbers in light of “together in our before,” which passes through the impending sense of judgement into an existential understanding of life as a continuous, temporary state of “before” shared by all. In this context, the “numbered” recalls the phrase that all of our days are numbered, reuniting him by shared mortality, in retrospect at least, with the “others / like me bearing their blood / but inside their bodies.”
This insubstantial common ground mutually arises as both cause and effect of the interior awakening in the final stanza, which is partly a response to his own dreading of “news, not even / good news, all news cleaving / me from my brothers.” This dual experience of empathy and of felt need for community opens to the final visceral epiphany of his own capacity to feel, brought on equally by the feared loss of his own life and the lives of those with whom he feels increasingly connected. Accordingly, the final line can be read as both an emphatic double statement of the speaker’s ability to feel and as a meta-perception of that same feeling. These twin awakenings of existential and interior awareness foster and are reaffirmed by the work of creative and relational spiritual imagination in some of the other poems.
“Days of 1992” mourns William Smith, who did not survive:
Toweled off, in a bed,
discussing fucking,
he wanted not to hear
my question on HIV.
In our discordant honesty,
my shrinking fear,
his bruised eyes,
and our safe try,
we ebbed.
Later as he edged
closer to dying,
he gave me a heart,
the size of sand dollar,
metallic, purplish, weighty,
in a purple velvet pouch.
An invitation, talisman,
dismissal, reprimand:
he didn’t say, I didn’t ask.
I said just thank you.
The line breaks are all phrase-stopped, yet nearly every one offers a small honesty of its own, the speaker neither rushing nor withholding disclosure. The forthright but spare narration mirrors the speaker’s discretion in respecting William’s request for interior space in his own confrontation with death, a space the poem recreates, offering no retrospective or reconstructive speculation, preparing the poem’s ending:
He was one of the quicker men to go,
before Clinton felt our pain.
Now I’m holding his purple heart.
It’s heavy to heft or clasp.
William, I have questions to ask.
The final couplet’s rhyme recreates the duality between physical embrace and deeper conversation in silence from earlier in the poem, now resonating with the irrevocability of the speaker’s longing. The questions again go unasked. They may be different questions. We can’t know; the speaker’s interaction with his poetically animated predecessor is no more intrusive than the one in the story, ending at precisely the same point, stating the existence of questions. The solemn, reverencing tone of the poem, in fact, seems to arise directly from this steadfast respect for the interiority of the other, allowing the speaker to rest in his own with the poem’s conclusion. In this process, however, the memory of William takes on a dignity of mirroring the speaker’s own interiority, the very interior to which we turn with questions made unnecessary to voice by their replies of fear and trembling. Perhaps one role of a religious reverencing of the dead is cultivating the habit of seeking their quiet mentoring as we await what they have faced, open guidance in embracing life alongside the conscious presence of death. Perhaps a considered voice may most simply be understood as one in the habit, owing to such tutelage, of remaining quiet when it is silence’s turn to speak.
Regard for the other’s interiority – both for its own sake and as a provocateur of the speaker’s own – opens radically to several paeans to underpraised, poignantly imagined creatures, for example, “Gribbles,” who are praised in exuberant right-branching syntax as …
shipworms, termites of the sea,
isopods gnawing at the hull,
one twenty-fifth of an inch
of mouth and execution,
grateful as worms can be
to swell your multitudes,
In addition to providing variety of tone and subject matter, the gribbles open the speaker to a spiritual self-correction, simply by presenting themselves in his world as embodied expressions of themselves, whether or not this conforms to his conscious will: “you golden cancers of my plans, / break me open and down.” In the context of the collection’s considerable cultural, historical and existential tumult, this ending provides an essential centering prayer to a counterintuitively glorious psychological god image.
We are invited to perceive an unfolding in thought of this willingness to be broken “open and down” in the excellent meditation “Disbelieving These Deaths, I Go to Sit by Lake Hebron.” The speaker observes and re-grounds his thoughts in the reality of death through his understanding of the mind’s recurrent wish to fantasize it away:
The lake is only mildly disturbed; it didn’t know
the deceased, so its sympathies don’t extend to empathy
and it’s a lake, not a pathetic fallacy, though I try.
I work to stay here, not to be netted
to various keenings. Hard to do even on a good day.
Through the ironic tone, the speaker avoids projecting onto the lake and refuses to glorify or mysticize death with inventive keenings, both self-corrections toward simply accepting it, an important corollary of which is a refusal to euphemize the loss of others’ lives. Yet, in one of the most verifiable paradoxes of the psyche, the dead do live on:
In the shallows are the slabs of slate
like coffins fallen off a truck, each one
not containing a body I knew, although slate caskets
irretrievable in water speak to me. They inform me
that if I were really here I’d notice the cloud
very like a whale until it blossoms like a poppy, fast.
A chorus of dead from a chorus of caskets
ought to open their lids and shoulder out their slabs
to walk on water.
The speaker’s disciplined use of similes presents independently the slabs of slate and the imaginal coffins explicitly “not containing a body I knew.” The distinction that manifests the psychic contents as such allows them to be perceived in their full, if momentary, reality, “slate caskets / irretrievable in water.” In this context, as voices within the psyche, they remind the speaker of his own essential presence: Only if he “were really here,” present to himself, including the aspects that are not him, can the dead rise from the imaginal caskets, a miracle invoked by the biblical echo of walking on water.
Here, and in the subsequent litany of dead familiars raised into consciousness in their invocations, the speaker experiences another form of awakening to the fullness of psychic life, even a deepening of “I could feel I could feel” into an understanding that the impressions, introjects, and imaginal memories of the dead keep them alive in consciousness. The dead are raised within us precisely and paradoxically when the feelings that tether us together are held in the mind as such and not allowed to reify themselves into distortions of external reality. Within this understanding of reality, the speaker’s loss harbors an invisible dignity in which all involved are netted together, not by avoiding reality, but by deepening conscious enmeshment within its shifting psychic ground.
Accordingly, the “setting” of the poem is also identified as psychic terrain: “Hebron, the first city, arid, blazes from across the ocean.” Likewise, the part of consciousness that provides a home to the dead maintains a boundary from even the everyday reification of one’s own “personal” identity: “Here they are none of them at all, / evaporated out of time until I become / a lake nobody swims in.” Therefore, both the speaker and the actual lake meet this day as themselves, the lake able to reflect the psyche precisely because the speaker, in understanding the psyche’s limits as well as its multitudes, has made room for the lake’s own reality within it: “The lake is alive with togue, perch, and bass.” Indeed, this collection, as a whole, teems with the interplays of life between the psyche and the world, holding complicated understandings and reimagined valuing of history, family, and the revivifying other among its essential reflections.
[Published by Trio House Press on July 1, 2023, 104 pages, $18.00 paperback]